Empties

Empties

Jay Caselberg

Sometimes it's hard to know whether it's a man thing or a woman thing.  Perhaps it's neither, that impossible distance from reality, that hollow inability to touch feeling.  You might notice it after a while, as you get older, as the world creeps up and assaults your inner senses.  How exactly does it manifest?  As a void inside?  As a gap stretched from wall to wall of the inner self?

 Imagine, if you will, a sheet of thick plastic, draped, like on the inside of a building site, suspended like a parachute or tent just above your head and hanging down around you.  You can see the impression of faces and noses pressed against the sheet beyond -- sometimes, pale palm prints marked out in the dust.  Behind this formless definition lies truth.  The problem being, that in reaching for that truth, you risk suffocation.  To get close enough to see clearly, you have to press your face hard against the sheeting, and that cuts off your ability to breathe.

And so it is inside.

I first tasted that sense of removal in my late twenties.  Palpably, tangibly, the gap from reality began to grow inside, stretching across the dusty space of my inner walls.  What once had been a mere footstep had become a leap, a bound -- to step impossibly across a yawning void.  How was I to know it was preparation?  How was I to know where that understanding might lead me? 

I'd been married for about four years when I first really noticed the distance.

Anastasia and I got on well.  Though we had differences in the things we liked and the things we found interesting, difference was a healthy thing.  There were those tiny shreds of interaction that held us together and made the relationship what it was: the half-startled expression she used to get when she looked up and saw me; the vague quirk of her lips that showed something I had said had sparked something inside.  I found them all appealing.  Somehow, I stirred her, and she stirred me in return.

 "Stase," I'd say to her.  "What would my life have been without you?"  Then, I simply couldn't imagine it.  She'd smile and get that stupid grin, and I'd know that what I'd said had touched her.  She'd run her long fingers through her hair and look away, still with that half smile upon her lips.

Then came work and the mortgage and the bills and gradually, over time, that smile faded.  We never got around to having kids.  The time was never right, or our position wasn't secure or there were things we had to achieve with our lives first.  So many things stood in the way.  Perhaps if we'd managed it, the kids would have brought us together, strengthened the glue between us.  Perhaps.

All relationships go through their transitions, growing, shaping, morphing into places where they had never been before, or where you might not have expected them to go.  Once in a while, that path takes you to a locale not seen in your imaginings, nor mapped out in those fragile hopes and dreams.

 The night I slapped her, when her fingernails scored the flesh of my cheek, I knew the distance had grown too great.  I pulled my hand away from my face and looked dumbfounded at the pale brown blood stripes across my palm.  I lashed out, shocking myself by the action.  Where had the violence and hollow lack of feeling come from?  I looked at her then, with narrowed eyes.  They say the eyes are the windows of the soul, but all I saw in hers was dark emptiness, the softness gone hard.  Perhaps there should have been tears, but there weren't.

It was then that I started to search, to seek the thing that had passed from our little world.  If I couldn't find what I wanted inside, then I had to look elsewhere.

I walked out of the house the next morning, understanding that a bridge had been crossed.  Even though there was no going back, it wasn't enough.  I had a life like any other -- streets and buildings and offices and all the other rituals of adulthood.  I was forced to use her foundation to cover the marks, dabbing lightly with one fingertip across the ridged lines on my cheek, working it palely across the intervening skin as I leaned across the bathroom sink close to the mirror.  As I pulled the door shut, I was concocting stories in my head.